Parler (pronounced "parlor") is an American alt-tech social networking service associated with conservatives. Launched in August 2018, Parler marketed itself as a free speech-focused and unbiased alternative to mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Journalists described Parler as an alt-tech alternative to Twitter, with its users including those banned from mainstream social networks or who oppose their moderation policies.

Parler received criticism for its content policies, which some journalists and users claimed were more restrictive than the company portrayed and sometimes more restrictive than those of its competitors. Conservatives praised Parler as offering an alternative to censorship they claim to endure on more mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Parler's userbase grew exponentially during 2020 with minimal content moderation. After reports that Parler was used to coordinate the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, several companies denied it their services. Apple and Google removed Parler's mobile app from their app stores, and Parler went offline on January 10, 2021, when Amazon Web Services canceled its hosting services. Before it went offline in January 2021, according to Parler, the service had about 15 million users. Parler called the removals "a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace". Parler resumed service on February 15, 2021, after moving domain registration to Epik. A version of the app with added content filters was released on the Apple App Store on May 17, 2021. Parler returned to Google Play on September 2, 2022.

Parler was acquired by the digital media conglomerate Starboard on April 14, 2023, and was shut down on the same day. According to a statement by Starboard on the website's holding page, now removed, this was a temporary measure to allow the site to "undergo a strategic assessment".

On December 15, 2023, the company was sold to a new co-owner group consisting of Ryan Rhodes, Elise Pierotti and Jaco Booyens. Ryan Rhodes was appointed CEO. A 2024 relaunch was hinted at by the new ownership soon after the company purchase. In January 2024, the company's external social media outlets officially restarted operations to announce the relaunch. The platform itself remains inaccessible, but the website has been restored.

Founded 2018;
Founders:

• ​John Matze Jr.
• Jared Thomson
• Rebekah Mercer
• CEO Ryan Rhodes
• Key people Elise Pierotti and Jaco Booyens

History

Parler was founded by John Matze Jr. and Jared Thomson in Henderson, Nevada, in August 2018. The company's name was taken from the French word "parler", meaning "to speak". The name was originally intended to be pronounced as in French (French pronunciation: [paʁ.le], English approximation: PAR-lay), but is now pronounced as the English word "parlor" (/pɑːrlər/ PAR-ler). The Wall Street Journal first reported in November 2020 that conservative investor Rebekah Mercer had funded Parler, and Mercer has since been revealed to have been a co-founder of the company. According to Mercer, she co-founded Parler to counter the "ever-increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords". Thomson serves as the chief technology officer, and Matze was Parler's chief executive officer from its founding until January 2021. Both are alumni of the University of Denver computer science program, and were roommates while in college. Some other Parler senior staff also attended the school.

Parler experienced a surge in signups in mid-2020. In May, Twitter sparked outrage among President Trump and his supporters when it flagged some of the president's tweets about mail-in ballots as "potentially misleading", and a tweet regarding the George Floyd protests as "glorifying violence". In response, Parler published a "Declaration of Internet Independence" modeled after the United States Declaration of Independence, and began using the "#Twexit" hashtag (a portmanteau of "Twitter" and "Brexit"). Describing Twitter as a "Tech Tyrant" that censored conservatives, the campaign encouraged Twitter users to migrate to Parler. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino announced on June 16 that he had purchased an "ownership stake" in Parler, in an effort to "fight back against" what he described as "Tech Tyrants" Facebook and Twitter. Parscale, who at the time was managing the Trump campaign, endorsed Parler in a tweet on June 18, also writing, "Hey @twitter your days are numbered", and including a screenshot of a tweet from President Trump which Twitter had flagged as "manipulated media".

On June 19, right-wing English media personality Katie Hopkins was permanently suspended from Twitter for violating their policies on "hateful conduct". An account falsely claiming to be hers appeared on Parler shortly after the ban, and was quickly verified by Parler. After the impersonator account had collected $500 in donations solicited on Parler, purportedly to sue Twitter over the ban, Parler removed it. A Twitter account affiliating itself with the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the imposture on June 20, and said they would donate the money they had collected to Black Lives Matter groups, a movement Hopkins had mocked in the past. Parler's then-CEO Matze made a public apology, with Parler acknowledging that the impersonator had been "verified by an employee improperly". Hopkins herself joined Parler on June 20, with Matze posting that he had personally verified her account. The incident drew some attention to Parler within the United Kingdom. Thirteen Members of Parliament had joined as of June 23, and some British right-wing and conservative activists endorsed the service over Twitter.

On June 24, 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump campaign was looking for alternatives to social media networks that had restricted their posts and advertising, and that Parler was being considered. Beginning in mid-2020, Parler negotiated with The Trump Organization, offering a 40% stake in the social network in exchange for Trump making Parler his primary social media platform. As a part of the deal, Trump would have had to post all his content to Parler at least four hours before publishing it to other networks. According to Michael Wolff, Trump representatives also included the condition that Parler ban anyone speaking negatively about Trump, which Parler did not accept. The White House Counsel's office reportedly halted the negotiations on the grounds that such a partnership would violate ethics rules as long as Trump was president. The general counsel for the nonpartisan watchdog non-profit Project On Government Oversight, Scott Amey, said there ought to be an "immediate criminal investigation" into the Trump administration over the negotiations.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz published a YouTube video on June 25, in which he denounced other social media platforms for "flagrantly silencing those with whom they disagree" and announced that he was "proud to join Parler". Other prominent Republican and conservative figures also joined in June, including Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, New York Representative Elise Stefanik, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.

Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing President of Brazil, joined Parler on July 13; Four months earlier in March 2020, Twitter had removed some of President Bolsonaro's posts for violating their rules on spreading disinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in July, his son Flávio Bolsonaro had endorsed Parler on Twitter. As a result, Parler experienced a wave of signups from Brazil in July. According to Bloomberg News on July 15, 2020, Brazilian users made up over half of all Parler signups that month.

On October 1, 2020, Reuters reported that people associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, a group known for their interference in the 2016 presidential election, had been operating social media accounts on both mainstream and alt-tech platforms. One of the accounts, named Leo, identified in an FBI probe as a "key asset in an alleged Russian disinformation campaign", had been spreading "familiar and completely false" information, including claims that mail-in voting was prone to fraud, that President Trump was infected with coronavirus by leftist activists, and that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was a "sexual predator". Axios reported that the account had not found much of an audience on mainstream platforms, but had caught on among the alt-tech platforms; the Twitter account had fewer than 200 followers, but had 14,000 on Parler. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all took actions to suspend the accounts from their platforms. The Washington Post reported on October 7 that Parler had declined to terminate the account after being informed of its connections to the disinformation organization, stating they did not need to act because they had not been contacted directly by U.S. law enforcement.

Also in October, as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube acted to ban content supporting the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, thousands of QAnon proponents migrated to Parler. Similar actions by Facebook against organizations promoting violence prompted some members of the Proud Boys and adherents of the boogaloo movement to move to Parler.

Parler experienced a wave of signups following the 2020 U.S. presidential election from American conservatives, concerned that their posts – or those of other conservatives on mainstream social networks – would be affected by the platforms' efforts to quash misinformation about the election. The app was downloaded nearly a million times in the week following Election Day on November 3, and rose to the top of both the Apple App Store's and the Google Play Store's lists of most popular free apps. Following the election, The Verge reported that Parler had become a "central hub for many of the conservative protests against recent election results", including the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory, which alleged widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The surge had largely abated by December 2020, with downloads of the app returning to numbers similar to before the election. According to findings from Stanford researchers published on January 28, 2021, Parler registered 7,029 new users per minute during the election.

A verified account on Parler claiming to be Ron Watkins, the former site administrator of 8chan and son of 8chan owner Jim Watkins, made several posts on November 15, 2020, appearing to confirm theories that his father was Q, the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. It was later determined that security researcher Aubrey Cottle had taken advantage of Parler security flaws to change the name of an already-verified Parler account, giving it the appearance of belonging to and having been verified as Watkins. This incident led to a feud between Watkins and Parler investor Dan Bongino, with Watkins publicly criticizing Parler's security on Twitter and describing the service as "compromised". Bongino responded by tweeting insults at Watkins.

2021

Parler was among the social media services used to plan the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. On January 2, Parler notified the FBI about material that Parler's lawyers found sufficiently alarming to warrant law enforcement attention, including posts by a user who declared that January 6 would be "the final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill". On January 5, the Secret Service warned the Capitol Police about an individual who intended to attend the rally and incite violence, and whose Parler posts included threats of violence against police. Mentions of "civil war" on Parler increased fourfold in the hours just prior to the storming. According to BuzzFeed News, after the riot at the Capitol, Parler had been "overrun" with death threats, encouragement of violence, and calls for Trump supporters to join another armed march on Washington, D.C. on the day before the inauguration of Joe Biden. Activists, including Sleeping Giants, and employees of technology companies that had been providing services to Parler began to pressure those companies, which included Google, Apple, and Amazon, to deny service to Parler.

Parler experienced a wave of downloads after Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump from their platform due to his remarks about the storming of the Capitol. This led Parler to become the top downloaded app on the Apple App Store on January 8.

Shutdown by service providers

  On January 8, two days after the storming of the Capitol, Google announced that it was pulling Parler from the Google Play Store, contending that its lack of "moderation policies and enforcement" posed a "public safety threat". Also on January 8, Apple informed Parler that they had received complaints about its role in the coordination of the riot in Washington D.C., the existence of "objectionable content" on the service, and that they had observed that "the app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities," in violation of Parler's own guidelines forbidding such content. Apple requested Parler submit a "moderation improvement plan" within 24 hours or face removal from the App Store. On Parler, Matze posted that Parler would not "cave to pressure", and accused Apple of being anti-competitive. Apple followed through with their warning the next day, removing Parler from the App Store on January 9. Ahead of the shutdown, some Parler users issued calls for violence and armed protests at state capitols and circulated conspiracy theories about Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook later explained that in the company's view, "free speech and incitement of violence" do not have "an intersection". Cloud communications company Twilio ended service to Parler, which made the service's two-factor authentication system stop working; Okta also denied them access to their identity management service, resulting in Parler losing access to some of their software tools. In addition, the database company ScyllaDB terminated its relationship with Parler, who had been using Scylla's Enterprise database.

On January 9, Amazon announced that it would suspend Parler from Amazon Web Services, effective at 11:59 p.m. PST the next day. Echoing Google's rationale for dropping its version of the Parler app, Amazon said Parler's failure to police violent content made the site "a very real risk to public safety". Parler went offline when Amazon withdrew its cloud computing services as scheduled. On January 11, Parler sued Amazon under antitrust law, saying the suspension of services was "apparently motivated by political animus", and had been carried out with the intention of benefiting Twitter by reducing competition. U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled in Amazon's favor ten days later. Parler also denied Amazon's claims that it failed to properly moderate content. On March 2, Parler withdrew a federal antitrust lawsuit they had filed against Amazon two months prior, but filed a new lawsuit against the company in state court. The new lawsuit alleged Amazon had breached terms in their contract and defamed Parler. Amid the lawsuit, in mid-April 2021, Amazon accused Parler of trying to conceal its ownership. On September 17, 2021, Seattle federal district Judge Barbara Rothstein approved Parler's request that its complaint against Amazon be heard in King County Superior Court.

Some applauded the technology companies' decisions to deny service to Parler. Others raised concerns about private enterprises determining what remains online. Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told The New York Times that he was concerned about neutrality when it came to Internet infrastructure providers such as Amazon AWS and app stores. Evelyn Douek, a lecturer and content moderation researcher at Harvard Law School, told The Wall Street Journal she thought an argument could be made to defend the infrastructure providers' decision to deny service to platforms who do not adequately moderate content, but wondered if similar amounts of violent content might exist elsewhere in platforms they were serving. Paul Levinson, a professor at Fordham University, wrote in The Conversation that although he believed the de-platforming violated the "spirit of the First Amendment", it was warranted due to the incitement to violence on the Parler site.

After the shutdown, Parler users were reported to have migrated to other alt-tech websites including BitChute, Clapper, CloutHub, DLive, Gab, MeWe, Minds, Rumble, and Wimkin, as well as encrypted messaging services including Telegram and Signal.